1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for configuring Ultra Mobile Broadband Femto Devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Femto Devices are base stations that support a very small cell radius. Typically, the Femto Device will be deployed in a home environment which has poor coverage from the larger maro cell where the Femto Device resides. Femto Devices are expected to be widely deployed in the coming year.
In the third Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) Interoperability Specification (A.S0020), an Inter-Access Network Signaling (IAS) protocol is defined for networks that support Ultra Mobile Broadband technology (UMB). UMB requires all base stations (BSs) serving a particular Access Terminal (AT) to be interconnected via an IP network, because packets destined to or arriving from the AT may be sent from or received on any BS that the AT is connected to. One method by which BSs can discover their neighbor base stations is through the use of IAS-Neighbor Discovery Report messages, which the BSs send to each other to report Access Network IDs (ANIDs—essentially IP addresses) of neighboring BSs as well as other UMB-related information about neighboring cells. The IAS-Neighbor Discovery Report message as defined in A.S0020 includes only information about immediate neighbors of the BS that transmits the IAS-Neighbor Discovery Report message.
In UMB networks, serving BSs must also connect to a Session Reference Network Controller (SRNC) which hosts an Anchor Route for the UMB session. All BSs serving the AT must use the same SRNC. In addition, it is desirable that all BSs serving the AT be connected to the same Access Gateway (AGW).
In a typical UMB Femto Device deployment, the Femto Device and the BS that controls the macrocell that the Femto Device resides in will need to be able to communicate via the UMB network protocols. In addition, in order for the UMB air interface to work properly (e.g. allow for smooth handoffs between the Femto Device and the macrocell), the Femto Device should connect to the same SRNC and AGW that the macrocell BS is connected to.
Contemporarily, the IAS-Neighbor Discovery Report message only contain ANIDS and sector information of the immediate neighbors of the BS that transmits the IAS-Neighbor Discovery Report message. For a deployment of many Femto Devices over a large area (possibly serviced by many macro BSs), each Femto Device would need to be individually provisioned with the IP addresses of the SRNC and AGW used by the macrocell BS where the Femto Device resides. This makes for a very cumbersome Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OA&M) process, whereby a central management system must first geographically locate the Femto Device when the Femto device is initialized, identify the most likely macrocell that the Femto Device resides in, identify the BS that controls that macrocell, and then identify the SRNC and AGW that host that BS. There exists a need in the art for a more dynamic signaling method by which the Femto Device can attain the SRNC and AGW connection information directly from the BS that is controlling the macrocell that the Femto Device is residing in.